TV Tropes Monday: Mundane Dogmatic

That is a question that lurked in the shadows of the genre since the beginning. For some anything beyond 20 minutes into the future is sci-fi, even if it had elves, psychic magic, and teleportation. For the futurist, science fiction was a window into our future, an extrapolation of what we knew into what could be. Today they stick to the Mundane Dogmatic, a set of self-impose rules that show case how hard or “realistic” their view of the future is or should be.

This raises a few questions:

How accurate is the science employed in the work?

What happens when science inevitably marches on?

What narrative possibilities, if any, were lost in the pursuit of accuracy?

I find the whole concept a straight jacket, but other might like the challenge. It is up to each writer to decide how close they cleave to this set of self-imposed rules.